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Luxe Could Be Getting $50M From Hertz At $110M Pre-Money Valuation

Luxe is in talks with a strategic investor that will infuse the company with “tens of millions” in new financing from Hertz, our sources tell us.
One source tells us that the round could be around $50 million at a pre-money valuation above $110 million. This source also suggested that existing investors may participate in this round. Our understanding is that the round is still…

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Spark, The Mailbox Alternative, Lands On The iPad

Spark, the email program that is set to replace the ever-popular but defunct Mailbox, has landed on the iPad and iPad Pro, a move that should please email power users. The app sports a number of popular features, including read later and mailbox organization. However, the system also creates read receipts and allows you to send emoticon replies to messages. The app has been updated to support…

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Tablets Are Dead

In 2010, tablets were supposed to be the new hot thing. Apple released the first iPad, Samsung was working on the Galaxy Tab and countless others were about to flood the market with Android tablets. Six years later, there weren’t any tablets at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Companies and consumers have moved on. Tablets are dead.

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Facebook Officially Launches Canvas Ads That Load Full-Screen Rich Media Pages In-App

Instant Articles, meet Instant Ads. Facebook wants to give advertisers an immersive way to reach people without making them leave the social network. So today it officially launched its ad Canvas for all advertisers. When users click a Facebook News Feed ad connected to Canvas, it opens a full-screen, rich media page inside of Facebook rather than forcing users to wait for a mobile website…

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Drawbridge Is Building A Business Beyond Ad Targeting

Drawbridge isn’t just an ad-tech company anymore. We’ve written about how the company, which is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, has built technology to determine when the same person is using multiple devices — so data from one device can be used (in an anonymized way) to target ads another. However, CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan said that…

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RevTwo Brings Real-Time Screen Sharing, Chat, & Voice Calls To Mobile Apps

What if mobile applications weren’t standalone, isolated experiences, but could actually connect users to each other – or even to the app’s developers – with a push of a button? That’s the vision behind a startup called RevTwo, exiting from stealth today. Its mobile app SDK for iOS lets developers offer a range of in-app support services for an…

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Gmail For Android Gets Rich Text Formatting And Instant RSVPs

Google announced two small but useful updates for Gmail on Android today: rich text formatting and instant RSVPs. Rich text formatting has long been available for Gmail on the web, but this is the first time Google has brought it to mobile. The formatting options are pretty straightforward: You can bold, italic, underline, color and highlight text. Sadly, you still can’t link text in…

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Crossroad Becomes Comet, Raises Funds For Its Collaborative Photo Album App

Comet is a nifty little iOS and Android app that lets you create and share photo albums with your friends and family. Comet is trying to solve a simple problem, but does it in a compelling way. When you go to a wedding or a road trip, you won’t ever see your friends’ photos as they will stay in their camera roll forever. Comet fixes that.

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There Are Now 200K Advertisers On Instagram

Instagram announced today that it has 200,000 monthly active advertisers. To compare, Facebook said a year go that it had more than 2 million active advertisers, while Twitter says it has 140,000 130,000. Probably the most impressive thing about the Instagram number is the fact that the Facebook-owned photo-sharing service only had a few hundred advertisers back in June. Much of that growth…

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Google Starts Highlighting AMP Pages In Its Mobile Search Results

Smartphones and networks are constantly getting faster, but somehow the mobile web now feels slower than it ever did. That’s largely thanks to all the ads and trackers that most sites now use (and maybe the abundance of large GIFs, too).
A few months ago, Google set out to change this when it launched the Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) project that aims to bring a Facebook Instant…

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Facebook Enhances Everyone’s Like With Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry Buttons

Humanity has been boiled down to six emotions. Today after tests in a few countries, Facebook is rolling out its augmented Like button “Reactions” to all users. This article has been boiled down to six emotions too. Like – Facebook designed Reactions so Liking is still as easy ever. You’ll see the Like button on every post, but now if you tap and hold on it (or hover…

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Apperian Opens APIs To Give Developers Piecemeal Access To Mobile App Management Platform

Apperian, the Boston-based company that offers mobile app management (MAM) as a service, announced today that it was exposing the different pieces of its platform as a set of open APIs. This will allow developers to tap into the various parts of the Apperian solution and take advantage of the security, lifecycle management or distribution components Apperian has developed without buying…